01The road to Madurai
Madurai had been held by a Sultanate since the 1330s, and the great temples of the Tamil country had been plundered. Bukka sent his son Kumara Kampana south. Kampana first took the Sambuvaraya kingdom around Kanchi, and then, around 1371, broke the Madurai Sultanate. His queen Gangadevi wrote the Sanskrit poem Madhura Vijayam about the campaign; in it the goddess of Madurai appears to Kampana in a dream and asks him to free her land. The Ranganatha murti, carried away from Srirangam decades earlier for safety, was brought back and reconsecrated in 1371.
02A king for all
An inscription of 1368 at Shravanabelagola records a dispute between the Jains and the Srivaishnavas of his kingdom that Bukka settled in person. He placed the hand of the Jain leaders in the hand of the Vaishnava acharyas and declared that each was to practise their faith freely and that the Vaishnavas were to protect the Jain shrines. Against the Bahmani Sultans he fought hard wars over the Raichur doab, with heavy losses on both sides, and he kept the Tungabhadra frontier. His son Harihara II was the first of the line to take the full imperial title Maharajadhiraja.
